It is worth noting, just
as a brief background, that the era roughly between the
end of the Civil War and
the onset of World War I was a time when the process of
expansion to western frontiers was central to the course
of American history, building on western migrations of
the antebellum era and extending them in new directions.
Moreover, it was a time when the west and frontiers achieved
positions at the center of the American popular imagination
and of American culture as they probably never had before
and probably never would again until the golden age of
the television and film westerns in the post-World War
II era.

pba00956 Ups and downs of an Army officer([s.n.], 1900))

These were decades when Americans moved west of the
Mississippi River by the millions, particularly invading
the northern and western plains in massive numbers. Hundreds
of thousands of settler families hoped to take advantage
of federal land policies like the Homestead Act, railroad
companies built numerous transcontinental lines that crisscrossed
the United States, new mining frontiers emerged and boomed
and collapsed practically every year, and herders ran the
cattle drives out of Texas that became sources of legend
and folklore despite their relatively short lifespan.

All of these trends had devastating consequences for
the Indian tribes of the plains and of the southwest. The
former saw the basic foundation of their society and culture
demolished by the annihilation of millions of buffalo,
and all were forced into submission and onto reservations
by the American military in a series of wars between the
1860s and the 1880s.

Whatever their consequences for Indian
life, nearly all of these trends were also celebrated by
white Americans
across the United States. As they worried about the potential
of urban living, industrialization, immigration, mass society,
and other manifestations of modernity for undermining the
stability and strength of the nation, emasculating American
men, and introducing a crisis of moral weakness, for cultural
regeneration and power Easterners looked to a set of myths
about western frontiers and the values they supposedly
produced.

Burgeoning expansionism let white Americans believe
that the country was finally fulfilling its manifest destiny,
completing its conquest of the continent, and achieving
a new stage of national greatness. Buffalo hunters, cowboys,
soldiers, lawmen, and even heroic outlaws were venerated
as models of rugged American masculinity triumphing over
the dangerous wilderness and savage Indians.

pba00671The Virginian (The Macmillan Company, 1904)

William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s
Wild West Show, a pageant of American triumphalism, became
a
runaway sensation all over the world for decades. Theodore
Roosevelt became America’s first cowboy president.
Western dime novels sold by the thousands. And Owen Wister’s
best-sellingThe Virginian enshrined
as a central cliché of
American popular culture the hyper-masculine hero who spoke
with his actions, lived by the "code" of the
West, and proved to his beloved Eastern bourgeois schoolmarm
that
her conventional
morality had to be adjusted to meet the conditions of life
on the frontier.

pba00731
My life on the plains; or, Personal experiences with Indians
(Sheldon and Company, 1874)

All of these sorts of themes and
ideas are evident in the bindings of the late 19th and
early 20th century, suggesting
that artists and publishing companies both responded to
and fed the desire of their audience for stories of the
American West and American frontiers that bolstered an
evolving national mythology. Take, for example, the stories
told by American army officers who had themselves served
in the Plains campaigns against Native Americans. George
Custer’s memoir,My Life on the Plains,
couldn’t
possibly tell of his “personal experience” of
seeing his overconfidence catch up with him at Little Bighorn.
But any potential reader’s eye would surely be caught
by the enormous bison head on the cover, which was a symbol
that instantly said “western.”

The cover art of other soldiers’ stories conveyed
their themes instantly as well. Col. Richard Dodge’s
stories of Our Wild Indians, for example,
depicted actual Indians only in faceless silhouette. But
with shields and tomahawks emblazoned prominently on the
front and spine, one could be guaranteed that Dodge’s “experiences” with
the "Red Men of the Great West" would be filled
with accounts of triumphs over the warriors of the plains.
Such promise was undoubtedly also fulfilled by George Armes’ work,
the cover of which depicted white cavalry officers gunning
down two Indians armed only with the bows and arrows that
could surely not withstand American military might.

Book covers of this era that spoke
to the western and frontier experience hardly always
engaged contemporary
themes. The history of the American frontier remained incredibly
popular, including older fictionalized versions of works
like this one of antebellum
novelist William Gilmore Simms.
What’s striking about this edition of Guy
Rivers: A Tale of Georgia,
as well as about N.E. Jones’ stories about the
Ohio
frontier, is how both depict the frontier as essentially
an empty if vaguely menacing wilderness. If the book covers
are to be believed, there are apparently no people in the
west the pioneers of these stories are to conquer, or at
least none that deserve central roles in the stories. Yet
both covers depict weaponry, implying the presence of wild
animals, wild Indians, or both, and certainly promising
the reader that the violence they expected and desired
from frontier tales could be found inside.

Not that works about places whose frontier days had
long since gone, like Ohio and Georgia, never depicted
the Native American residents who had been evicted amidst
the onslaught of white settlement. Indians, after all,
were in some ways the main attraction for American readers
drawn to tales about the west and the frontier. But several
revealing patterns emerge in these depictions of Native
Americans.

pba01111 Natchez: its early history ( J. P. Morton and Company, 1930)

First, no matter where or when
the story of the book in question is supposed to occur,
Indians portrayed on
a book’s cover are practically always the stereotyped
Plains Indians that to this day scream “Indian” to
most Americans. Take, for example, Joseph
Shields’ account of the early days of white presence in and around Natchez,
Mississippi. Although there certainly were Indians belonging
to the Natchez and other tribes in the area in the 17th
and 18th centuries, none wore the elaborate feathered headdress
like the individual depicted on the cover of this book.

pba00942
Red Eagle and the wars with the Creek Indians of Alabama
(Dodd, Mead and Company, 1878)

Perhaps most
ludicrous in its depiction of Indians and Indian life is this
work on the Creek War. That military
affair did indeed take place, in 1814 and 1815, largely
in what is now Alabama. Anyone involved in that war,
however, would likely have been thoroughly confused had
they seen any animal like the bison whose head is the most
prominent feature of this historical work’s cover,
as the bison’s habitat ranges almost exclusively
west of the Mississippi River and centers on the Great
Plains.

But by 1878, when this book was
published, Americans saw bison and thought “Indian.” Differentiating
among Indian tribes and their cultures, or the reality
that most Creek Indians likely never saw a bison before
their evacuation to Oklahoma was likely not a major concern
for publishers, and may not have been one for most readers
either.

A second pattern that emerges from depictions
of Indians in American bindings is that no matter where
they are supposed
to be and no matter what genre the book represents, Native
Americans are one of the following: (1) dangerous and violent
savage forces that need to be dominated by the forces of
American
civilization,
(2) passive witnesses to the march of the white man across
the western landscape, or (3) primitive creatures of nature.

pba00550
Pioneer boys of the Ohio
(Page Company, 1925)

So the work
on the Creek Wardepicts,
despite its title, not the armies of Andrew Jackson against
the organized
forces of Red Eagle, but rather a lone white man with a
gun attempting to pick off spear-carrying Indians on horseback. The
Pioneer Boys of the Ohio, a book for
young readers, portrays an Indian, barely clothed but for
the ubiquitous
headdress, watching white pioneers march across the landscape
from a secreted location in the woods. Ned
in the Block House, also for
young readers, depicts a young Indian boy staving off the
advances
of a bear with nothing
but a torch and an unused bow and arrow while the young
white boy on the spine demonstrates with his rifle how
the forces of progress deal with the creatures of the woods.

pbw00664
Aus der heimath des rothen mannes
(George Brumder, 1897)

Even works designed for sale to
immigrant readers were clearly geared toward these kinds
of themes and stereotypes.Aus
der Heimath des Rothen Mannes(In
the Home of the Red Men), for example, published
in Milwaukee presumably for German immigrants, serves up
the headdress-wearing Plains Indian along with the tomahawk
and other weaponry that represent the apparent core of
Indian culture. Below the Indian head, meanwhile, one can
see a crisscrossed spear and gun, hinting at the clash
between civilization and savagery that undoubtedly lies
between the covers.

Those immigrants who preferred
a less violent take on Native American life, meanwhile,
might choose Bilder
aus der Geschichte Amerika's (Pictures
from America’s History). Unlike Aus
der Heimath des Rothen Mannes,
which was published less than a decade after the last stand
of the Sioux at
Wounded Knee, Bilder
aus der Geschichte Amerika's was published
just after the Civil War and before the realities of the
Plains
Indian wars had penetrated American consciousness. The
Indians chosen to represent “America” to immigrants
on this cover, however, are no less subject to the influence
of the white man, if perhaps in a more benevolent light,
as they are offered the blessings of Christian civilization
by a white preacher.

Ultimately, of course, the Indians
depicted on the bindings of this period were less real
people than they were
symbols of the American landscape before the age of civilization.
In the end, the Indians who remained in the West were suitable
as tourist attractions alongside other “exotic” non-white
peoples like the Mexicans of the southwest. Such, at least,
is certainly suggested by the choice of this publisher
to exemplify the western tourist experience in 1891 with
an inset of a Mexican and his burro, above which one can
see a tall Indian smiling as he watches the approaching
forces of capitalist progress embodied by the railroad
train.

pba00499Jack Sutherland(T.Y. Crowell, 1926)

pba00679The Riflemen of the Ohio (D. Appleton and Company, .1919)

pbw00015The border boys with the Texas
Rangers(A.L. Burt, c.1912)

pba00674The log of a cowboy(Houghton, Mifflin and Company,
1903)

pba00675A Texas matchmaker(Houghton, Mifflin and Company,
1904)

pba00161Wild bandits of the border:
a thrilling story of the adventures
and exploits of Frank and Jesse
James(Belford, Clarke and Company,
1888)

pba00524When Wilderness Was King(A.C. McClurg and Company, 1904)

The real heroes of the American
West, as one decodes the binding designs of the late
19th and early 20th centuries,
were its white men. They were the ruggedly masculine, buckskin-clad,
knife- and rifle-wielding wilderness pioneer protagonists
of books like Jack Sutherland and The
Riflemen of the Ohio. They were the
cowboys of The
Border Boys with the Texas Rangers who
busted broncos and tamed the wild horses of the west. They
were the trail
riders of The Log of
a Cowboy and the romantic
figures of A Texas Matchmaker, who got the girl and marched in the lead while Mexicans
trailed behind.
They were even the outlaws and train robbers like the James
gang (Wild Bandits of the Border),
whose viciously brutal guerrilla activities during and
after the Civil War were lost amid more popular accounts
of their daring crimes and manly gunplay.

And what those heroes did was clear the
way for modernity and for the progress of American civilization,
reaching
new frontiers and recapitulating the path to modernity
that was reaching its pinnacle in the East but that in
the West still left room for new pioneers and new paths
to the future. After the buckskin-clad pioneer and the
cowboy, went the story of the American West, came the stagecoach
and the railroad, bringing the products, people, and industry
of the East to civilize the region.

If the art of any single book
could be said to encapsulate the depictions of Indians
and the western frontiers in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I would make a
case for When
Wilderness Was King. Published
in 1904, the book’s cover depicts a white woman in
a long white dress trailing a flowing shawl, set against
the backdrop of an entirely empty landscape, devoid not
only of people and wildlife but of any discernible features
at all but for the hills behind her that, along with the
wind apparently blowing in her face, suggest she is outdoors.

If a solitary white woman in the
primitive west implied multiple potential conquests for
the American pioneer,
the endpapers of the book brought the major themes of the
story of America’s western expansion all together:
the cavalry officer facing off against the headdress-adorned
Indian, the generic Indian tepee juxtaposed with the buckskin-wearing
and rifle-bearing pioneer and his Victorian bride, all
revolving around the army fort situated at the page’s
center. If the book’s contents told of a time when
wilderness was king, the new king of the world was the
triumphant white American.

Surely many of the stories told
by the pages of these books carried more complex and
ambiguous messages about
the west and the frontier than their covers might suggest.
Stories about the west were often fraught with ambivalence
about the passing of a supposedly more primitive age, and
about the replacement of a non-industrialized and rural
landscape and its inhabitants with the wave of the future
that to most Americans was the only path to progress and
civilization. For all their beliefs about the inevitable
destruction of Native Americans and their ways of living,
many Americans were simultaneously attracted and repelled
by Indians, as the very phrase “noble savage” implies.

pba00361Ned in the block house (Cassell and Company, 1908)

Even in the bindings of the period,
one can occasionally sense this sort of ambivalence.
I draw your attention back,
for example, to the children’s book Ned in
the Block House. Surely it is no coincidence
that both the Indian and the white boy on the book’s spine
and cover wear essentially the same clothing, and are differentiated
only by their skin color, their weaponry, and their choice
of headgear. Even as the message of the book was surely
that white civilization was superior to that of the Indian,
no author or publisher could deny that young white boys,
and by extension adult white men, loved to “play” Indian,
if only temporarily.

But in most of the bindings of
this period, the message is far less mixed. Book covers
are designed at least in
part to grab the attention of readers, to speak to them
with images and symbols whose codes they can read and understand
instantly. And when it came to attracting readers with
tales of the expanding United States and the shrinking
frontier, the art of the book boiled down national mythology
to its essence.